Let the Summer Cruise Begin!!

This is where we’re headed! Our insurance only allows us to go north to the 52nd parallel, which is basically at the top of Newfoundland. That’s far enough, thanks!

We’re headed north again this summer. Our ultimate goal is to cruise North West Newfoundland and Labrador. Michelle, you see, wants to get a picture of Roam with an iceberg in the background and what Michelle wants..

Actually, we’re both really excited to stretch a bit this year and visit a really remote cruising ground. Whether we make it that far north or not, depends entirely on weather. The cruising season is short in Newfoundland and in some years, conditions never improve enough to allow safe/comfortable cruising. We are heading north with every intention of completing our mission, but we’re prepared to change plans if the weather doesn’t cooperate. Stay tuned to see how far north we get!

In the meantime, we left Fort Pierce on May 30, just after sunrise, with plans to skim up the east coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. We would have preferred to jump in the Gulf Stream which is very close to shore in South East Florida and ride it all the way up the coast until it starts to bend east toward Europe and then hook a left and continue on up to Cape Code. Unsettled weather forced us to take the more conservative route, along the coast. Our plan was to hug the coast and if the weather turned snotty, we could pop in to one of many ports along the coast. In the end, we had fantastic weather all the way up to Beaufort, NC and we probably could have kept on going in very settled weather, but after about 73 hours running nonstop, we were ready for a break. Besides, our friends Clayton and Deanna are traveling with us on their Nordhavn 50, Tivoli and they had a couple of non-critical issues that needed to be attended to before they became critical. So in to Beaufort we went. We’re enjoying this wonderful, small town while we’re here. Today we dropped the Moped on the dock so we could take a tour and take advantage of the wonderful, cool weather.

Roam following Tivoli (Nordhavn 50 owned by Clayton and Deanna Naeve) out of the marina at Fort Pierce for a northern cruising adventure!

At the moment, we’re looking at unsettled weather offshore, so we’re planning to leave Beaufort on Tuesday and head north via the Intracoastal waterway (ICW) up to Norfolk. It’s looking like we’ll have a good window on Friday to leave Norfolk and make a 2 day jump up to Block Island, where we’ll take a break for a few days to play tourist.

We are planning to be in Boston for a week or so in Mid-June so we can spend some time with friends before we continue on to Nova Scotia. We want to be positioned in the Bras-d-Or Lakes so that we can jump across to Newfoundland as soon as the weather permits.